altering movies with sound/ creating visuals

Hi
I am trying to create visuals from live inpit from my turntables. I have got my turntables successfully creating signol is max/msp and showing up in the spectroscope. I now need to alter the frame rate of movies in max in conjunction with the bpm of the musical input. If anyone has anything they could tip me on that would be great.
Also if anyone has any tips on creating visuals in conjunction with live input, that would also be a great help.

Without doing pitch detection, you could use an amplitude gate to determine where (approx.) the beats are. This will work only if your music is fairly beat-heavy, and wouldn’t automatically carry over where there are breaks (unless you say so, by setting an automatic metronome using previous beats).

If your beats are going to be relatively constant, you could do a timer – tap tempo thing so you can manually enter the tempo along with the beats (just a couple clicks or keystrokes). Then it’ll run off that clock and carry over through breaks etc. If your tempo varies, you’d need the amplitude gate.

Ms. Pinky is also great as it provides a highly trackable sine wave for Max to use for other parameters (as is my understanding). Slowing / speeding / scratching the record will allow you to morph the params nicely. However, it uses up a turntable and doesn’t produce a very interesting musical sound in itself…. so…. maybe a good candidate for an older, less-used turntable off to the side.

You could use some MIDI controllers instead, or in addition to, your turntables. You can get a lot of knobs and faders in the space of one turntable… and mapping them using the ctlin object (and scale or zmap to scale the input values) is a snap in Max.

Try this out for beat detection and see if it helps–a variation of the thresh~ help file.